The City Symbolic

Recent drumbeats for “urban design” demand professional stock-taking in large-scale design theory. Professional preoccupations have relegated design to a minor place in the planning process, and the recent design revival promises little improvement. Ancient and successful combinations of the vernacular, a designing king, and leaders of architectural style, furnish precedents for a new triad of city-making disciplines. All parts of this triad should seek to create outward symbolic expressions of -whatever inner satisfactions arc sought in the city plan. Titus -will be created a wholeness and meaningfulness of form that can restore to the citizen his role as master of his own terrain.